PowerTOP is a great utility which allows you to diagnose power consumption on Linux machine.It provides with lots of stats mentioning power consumption per process, per processor, per device, idle states of each core etc.

Heres a guide on how to use powerTOP to increase battery life on Ubuntu or Linux installed laptops…

I own a Canon MP276 Ink jet printer.The official Ubuntu repositories contain drivers for most of the canon printers and it was there for mine too.But as I have found the quality of printing turns out to be great after installing official canon drivers from their website.

It is troublesome to find the drivers for Ubuntu on Canon.So the easiest way is add this PPA and install the drivers from there.

For adding this PPA, open the terminal and execute these commands one by one:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:michael-gruz/canon-stable
sudo apt-get update

The ADSL or Cable routers/modem that are used to connect to the internet are NAT enabled Firewalls.They protect the devices connected to them from unauthorized access from devices on the internet.I have used the term “devices” since it could be a computer, mobile or laptop with WiFi access etc. They group the devices behind the router into a private network and assign them a separate range of I.P. address (generally starting with 192.168). While the router itself has a public I.P. Address assigned by the Internet Service Provider (called as Internet address).

When a service from within the private network makes a request to a service on a remote network (e.g. a browser requesting a webpage on the Internet) an entry is created for that particular server in the NAT table maintained by the router.The device can only receive a response from the server for which it has made a request.It cannot receive requests / responses from any device whose entry is not present in the NAT table.

So what should you do a if you want to run a web server or a FTP server or any other service which you want to access from an external network like Internet.How would you access that particular service ?

The answer is Port forwarding or Port Mapping.Basically you create an exception within the NAT table of the router by opening some of its ports.You tell the router to accept all the requests to a particular I.P. and to a particular port.After you have done this the service running at that particular port will be accessible from any remote device.

Port Forwarding is recommended for Bittorent users.The port on which the torrent client (like utorrent or transmission) runs should be port forwarded to get more peers and achieve better download speed

Steps to PortForwading :

1. You need to assign a Static IP to your computer or device on which the service is going to run.The IP Address should be in the same range of your router.Suppose if your router has IP 192.168.1.1 then your computer should be assigned IP in the range 192.168.1.2 – 192.168.1.254.

2. Now using the routers interface we have to forward the port.Every router has a different interface but the process is pretty much the same.

Visit this link to find the guide specific to your router. If you are unable to find your router you can log into your router and find port forwarding settings under names like “NAT Rule”,”Virtual Server”,”Port Forwarding”. Many routers even have similar interface to other routers, so you can follow the procedure for the same.

3.If you have been able to successfully forward the specific port you can check it by visiting this link. Before checking see to it that the service is currently running at the configured port.

There are like hundreds of applications which can add albumart or correct the tag info of your music. But I find MusicBrainz Picard THE MOST ACCURATE application that does the job just fine.It not only supports mp3 but also formats like aac, ogg etc

Its free open source and runs on Windows ,Linux and Mac.I have tried it on Windows and Linux, it works like a charm on both.

The application analyses your music and embeds it with correct information and Album Art as ID3 tags .So even if you copy your music from your PC to your phone the album art will be see across devices.It can also scan your music files and tag them even if they do not contain any tags. Also it allows you to rename or move your files depending on the tags,thus completely organizing your music collection neatly.

It looks up media info from MusicBrainz (read as Wikipedia for music) which is a humongous encyclopedia containing information about albums,artists,releases,tracks and so forth.Even you can contribute to it.

This is a comprehensive tutorial for installing RouterTech Custom Firmware on your modem router.This tutorial is generic i.e. following this tutorial you can install the firmware on any routertech compatible router.This was made based on the documentation provided by RouterTech.org website. Lot of thanks to the Routertech Team.

RouterTech firmware is an open source Linux-based firmware for ADSL modem routers which have Texas Instruments AR7* chipsets.

Before you install you can take a demo of features supported by Routertech firmware here.

It supports routers from manufacturers like Dlink, Linksys, Acorp, Sofecom, Solwise & many more.See RouterTech Compatibility List for more. This list is identified by Routertech.org team.If your router is based on same chipset family there is a high possibility that your router supports the firmware even if it’s not listed (My Dlink GLB 502T router is not). Continue reading →